I can understand why getting a binary protocol accepted is hard, but I
would like to see a move in that direction. One other thing I'd like
to experiment with is using something like CORBA. My guess is that
systems like that are the way of the future, and that all things like
FTP/HTTP will become obsolete.

One other possible area where we could achieve a great deal of
compression is in the actual messages themselves. We can compress SGMl
tags by replacing the SGML GI with a 2 digit (hex) index number, and by
reducing the end tag to </>, and still remain textual. For the actual
message body, any number of quick, and lossless techniques will work,
and get an easy 12-25% reduction in size, and we still remian textual.